Real cruelty is the charge against this animal lover

Busting Bob Farner for alleged animal cruelty strikes me as itself an act of cruelty. Maybe I'll be convinced otherwise in court, but I sort of doubt it.

I mean, c'mon. This is like prosecuting Albert Schweitzer for medical malpractice in Africa, Mother Teresa for abusing lepers, Gandhi for assaulting a frail grandmother, Oprah for committing hate crimes.

Of all the bleeding hearts in North County, Farner's beats the bloodiest. His organization, Bob Farner's Wildlife Rescue, has evolved into an orphanage for disabled wild animals, an educational zoo with the style of Andy Griffith and the soul of St. Francis.

Is this someone who'd be criminally callous toward the suffering of a dying deer? Does this sound like a defendant who should have to declare he's "not guilty" at a misdemeanor arraignment today?

C'mon.

I'll grant San Diego's city attorney this much: Farner is the patriarch of one peculiar ark, a half-acre Vista homestead teeming with seven dogs (six have the run of his house), geese, sea gulls, turkeys, chickens, raccoons, ducks, owls, a hibernating alligator named Al, and Sheba, a passive mountain lion on her last legs.

Out in Valley Center, Farner runs another haven for the lame and the tame, including a bobcat and a diverse aviary of birds, most with bum wings.

If you swing by Farner's place, he'll hunker in his kitchen, stroke Bozo (one of his foundling dogs) and talk about growing up in Colorado.

"My mother says that when I started crawling I was raised on goat milk, and she always knew where I was at: I'd be out in the goats' pen sleeping with the goats."

As an almost feral boy of 10 or so, he'd run away for a week at a time, drawn by the call of the wild. "I gave my parents gray hair," he says.

Not long after, white hair. Farner ran away to join the Marines at 16. Captured in the Philippines. In his wallet, he carries two photos of himself: one as a fit 160-pound Marine before the war, the other as a somber POW in Japan, 40 pounds lighter, unbowed.

In the mid-'70s, long after retirement from the Corps, Farner found his spiritual vocation by serendipity. A tame hawk flew into his back yard. As a result, he started volunteering at North County Wildlife Rehabilitation in Poway. When that organization folded, he started his own outfit. In the past couple of decades, he says, he has rescued 20,000 animals, give or take thousands of birds, possums, snakes, you name it.

Here's a classic Farner tale with a little (death) rattle.

"I got bit by a rattlesnake a couple of years ago. I picked him up in an apartment and he was a little one and I had him by his neck and I was carrying him and I said, 'Gee, he's choking' -- you see, he had his mouth wide open. So I pulled up a little bit and my finger flew up and hit the fang."

Farner thought nothing of it until he felt an electric shock running down his hand. He threw the snake into a bucket and tore toward Tri-City Medical Center. In the confusion, the bucket turned over and the snake got loose in the back of his van. "I had my dogs with me. It was so funny. The nurses got worried about the dogs. They brought all six into the hospital!"

Time was, he had to put animals down if they couldn't be reintroduced to the wild. Ice chests pumped with gas served as death chambers. Mice and other tiny critters went into the freezer to die. He never liked it. Doesn't do it anymore.

"That's my fault," he says, stroking Bozo. "I don't like to put them to sleep. I've seen people suffer, beaten to death. Life is just it."

On that morning in Rancho Peñasquitos a year ago, Farner was in a time bind, he says. He had to go to an important doctor's appointment at the VA before taking a mortally injured deer to Camp Pendleton (where a game warden could shoot it and Farner could take the fresh meat to Sheba).

Farner says the deer was lying quietly in the back of his van. "It never suffered," he says. Obviously, the city attorney, wised up by a San Diego Humane Society probe, believes otherwise.

But if the suffering was so obvious, why didn't police officers shoot the injured deer? Instead, cops helped Farner hoist it into his van.

This story smacks of unrevealed subtext. Is this strange case some sort of payback against Farner?

Granted, he's not the sort to excel at bookkeeping. Maybe every animal in his care doesn't have a permit. Maybe his digs aren't up to the snuff of modern shelters. But does he love his maimed menagerie and care for his animals like family? Sure seems so.

Bob Farner is getting on -- turning 78 next month. He's an easy target for hyper-humane prigs in suits.

Instead of sympathizing with Farner's extraordinary calling, the city attorney is working with the supposedly humane society to ruin his reputation.